The Space Between

with music by Joe Domencic
2005

The Space Between was an experiment in musical theater as performance art. The gallery space was transformed into a set row houses, modeled after the architecture of Bloomfield and Lawrenceville - two nearby neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. The installation recreated and exaggerated the real-life experience of walking in these neighborhoods on a summer evening.

The ubiquitous Bloomfield/Lawrenceville row house was built around the turn of the center for a primarily working-class community. The architecture features few frills. In this case, an entryway or foyer would be considered a frill. The neighborhood remains largely working class and few homes have central air-conditioning. On hot summer evenings, front doors opening directly into living rooms provide the nighttime wanderer a fascinating glimpse into a series of private worlds. I often speculated about the lives I peered into so eagerly - the families framed in photographs on the walls; the person who chose the wild-west scene to hang over the fire place; the old woman watching TV in her slip. The fleeting view of a domestic space tells so much. These thoughts became the springboard for The Space Between.

I was also fascinated by the subtle transfer of information through the shared walls of a row house. I was amazed by how much I knew about neighbors with whom I barely spoke. I began to develop two characters who lived side by side and carried out their daily activities in near unison. While their lives played out in close physical proximity, a vast psychological divide separated the characters. During the looping sequence of the performance, their isolation was broken by song and dance numbers that expressed their desperate desire for contact. In a dream-like sequence, the characters revealed their intimate knowledge of the person living just a few inches away and yet they returned each time to their isolated worlds separated by a common wall.

Using the heightened reality and humor of the musical genre, The Space Between explored the complex ways in which lives intersect in dense urban environments; how much we know and how little we say.